Dov Katz, Oculus’ head of computer vision, was arrested in December last year for soliciting sex from an undercover officer. The crime at the center lay in his belief that the undercover officer was actually a 15 year old girl.
Katz was arrested in late December last year, after he apparently agreed to pay $3,000 in return for physical intimacy with an undercover officer who was posing as an underage girl. Katz has now been replaced by Facebook, from his position at Oculus. He is no longer an Oculus employee either.
Replacing him is Amir Frenkel. Frenkel has served as head of wearables engineering at Google in the past and has been involved with initiatives like Google Glass. He joined Facebook last year, a month before the Katz scandal took place, as director of engineering.
Frenkel will have a tough job ahead of him. Sure, Oculus is one of the market leaders in VR and has Facebook’s backing. However, the company has been going through one of its toughest patches till date. Not only was it very recently involved in a lawsuit with Zenimax that saw it ordered to pay out half a billion dollar, it also lost its Co-Founder Palmer Luckey fairly recently.
Luckey’s departure came on back of allegations — that were later accepted by him as true — that he had funded an anti-Clinton online action group during the 2016 Presidential election. The admission got many develoeprs so angry that they refused to work with the Rift platform. Following all the hullabaloo, Luckey decided to leave the company.
The company is currently being led by Hugo Barra, as Facebook’s Vice President of virtual reality.
